Just over ten years ago, two hundred municipalities all over Quebec were merged against their will. Some were amalgamated into megacities. The governing Parti Québécois had no mandate to do this; moreover, pleading the "urgency" to act, they refused to consult citizens.

Policy planners and health-policy experts can build their models and do their studies, but patients want high-quality service now, they want it free and they want it effective. They pay their taxes for a health-care system that is among the most expensive in the world. They are not getting enough value for money. Why not?

I visited 14 different cities, looking at some of the best and the worst in urban transportation. Moscow offered both: surface roads gridlocked by a nightmare of free-for-all congestion, and an awe-inspiring and efficient metro system, a legacy of the Soviet era, that kept working like clockwork beneath the streets.

Ofelia asked if I would like to see the Wall. We got into my car and she guided me along the paths to the border. It was quiet. Ofelia was quiet too and her presence lent the scene a kind of sacred stillness. She told me we were lucky -- the silence was too often punctured by helicopters and Border Patrol ATVs.

My book is neither a judgment of the Canadian Forces nor even a judgment about the validity of the war. It is a judgment concerning the language, stories and many self-deceptions that Canadians have either supported or not objected to, ones that have been used to enable our new, apparently jingoistic self.

In advance of the awarding of the annual $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing this Wednesday, HuffPost Canada will be running excerpts from the five finalists. Ron Graham's book documents the constitutional conference of November 1, 1981, as "the culmination of more than five decades of political wrangling, one last attempt to renew the constitution with the consent of the provinces."